Spring Break
Faculty approve film major
by Jillian Wagner
News Editor
News | 11/11/08
Posted online at 3:42 AM EST on 11/11/08
Faculty members at last Thursday's faculty meeting voted unanimously to pass a proposal to create a Film and Visual Media Studies major that, pending a review by the Board of Trustees in March, will be officially incorporated into the Brandeis undergraduate curriculum beginning in fall 2009.
The major's proposal states that the "humanities-driven course of study stresses analysis of film style and content, film history and the relationships between cinema and culture." Prof. Alice Kelikian (HIST) presented the proposal at the meeting.
At the meeting, Kelikian said the program "focuses primarily on the history and critical study of film as art, as social document and as text."
"The truth of the matter is that students already here and students who might want to come here wish to major in film, and we have everything to gain by letting them do so," Kelikian said.
According to the Nov. 6 faculty meeting agenda, the Film Studies major will be offered "for an initial period of three years" and will then be reevaluated, along with the minor, by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in 2012-2013.
The Film Studies minor was approved in 1994 and has continued to attract student interest. Prof. Matthew Fraleigh (GRAL), who is on the Film Studies committee, explained that "having interest from students and a very successful program helped us realize that it seemed like the next step to expand the minor into a major." Kelikian said in an interview with the Justice that there were 11 students in the program in 2006, but there are now 48.
Kelikian said at the faculty meeting that the film studies minor's growth "is as strong a sign as any I can think of that this is what students want and what we ought to offer them."
Lecturer in Film Studies and Director of Getz Media Lab Mark Dellelo, who is also the research and instruction film and media specialist in the library, explained "Now that digital technology has become so accessible, people are increasingly using a rhetoric of moving images to communicate with each other. I see filmmaking-or, more accurately, visual storytelling-as an essential literacy for the world we live in."
The major's proposal states that the "humanities-driven course of study stresses analysis of film style and content, film history and the relationships between cinema and culture." Prof. Alice Kelikian (HIST) presented the proposal at the meeting.
At the meeting, Kelikian said the program "focuses primarily on the history and critical study of film as art, as social document and as text."
"The truth of the matter is that students already here and students who might want to come here wish to major in film, and we have everything to gain by letting them do so," Kelikian said.
According to the Nov. 6 faculty meeting agenda, the Film Studies major will be offered "for an initial period of three years" and will then be reevaluated, along with the minor, by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in 2012-2013.
The Film Studies minor was approved in 1994 and has continued to attract student interest. Prof. Matthew Fraleigh (GRAL), who is on the Film Studies committee, explained that "having interest from students and a very successful program helped us realize that it seemed like the next step to expand the minor into a major." Kelikian said in an interview with the Justice that there were 11 students in the program in 2006, but there are now 48.
Kelikian said at the faculty meeting that the film studies minor's growth "is as strong a sign as any I can think of that this is what students want and what we ought to offer them."
Lecturer in Film Studies and Director of Getz Media Lab Mark Dellelo, who is also the research and instruction film and media specialist in the library, explained "Now that digital technology has become so accessible, people are increasingly using a rhetoric of moving images to communicate with each other. I see filmmaking-or, more accurately, visual storytelling-as an essential literacy for the world we live in."
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andy
Andy Harmon
posted 11/11/08 @ 2:33 PM EST
This article interests me because I graduated in 1968 with a BA in Fine Arts and received an MFA in Directing Theatre and Film in 1970. So I'm really pleased that studying film is coming back to Brandies. (Continued…)
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